Blog Tag Game

I'm a fan of nostalgic internet trends. We're hitting a point where things like Tumblr tag games (i.e., another user tags you in a list of questions about your interests) are starting to feel nostalgic. As avas.space suggests in this post, I think it could be fun to bring those games to blogging, and I'll be responding to her post today. I've also seen other bloggers I follow such as Manuel Moreale do this.

Ava's original post was aimed at the Bear blogging platform and references that in the questions, but I use Eleventy, so I made this more general. My slight paraphrase of her questions:

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?
2. Why did you choose [the blogging software/platform/tool you use]?
3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?
5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
7. Your favorite post on your blog?
8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

Feel free to copy them and post your own!

Here are my answers. If you blog, I think it would be fun to do this, and if you have webmentions on your site, please let me know if you post about it!

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

A bunch of things came together to inspire me. I was reading about the Gemini protocol; giving the Fediverse a serious go; reading about the IndieWeb; and I listened to Sophie Koonin's talk “This Talk Is Under Construction: A Love Letter to the Personal Website,” as well as this blog post about the early-aughts teen website scene. I wanted to interact on the Internet in a way that gave me more agency, so I decided to start a blog on my existing personal website.

2. Why did you choose [the blogging software/platform/tool you use]?

I use the static site generator Eleventy. A static site generator takes in a series of template files and produces HTML pages. The purpose is to automate repetitive parts of writing HTML—each page has the same header and footer, for example, and now I only need to type the code for that once. I settled on Eleventy because a number of people I know or whose blogs I read suggest it, including Benji, and I like that it uses a large number of template languages so I have the freedom to choose which one I want, and to change that decision later on.

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I used to write this entire site by hand! Even the RSS feed was hand-written. This made blogging much slower, although doing it that way did make it easier to get started. I hand-wrote my site in 2022 as my first web development project, and since it started as a static portfolio, hand-coding wasn't too inconvenient at the beginning, before I had 15+ blog posts.

4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

I used to write my blog directly in the VS Code editor, but lately I've been enjoying using the Zettlr note-taking program. I enjoy writing in Markdown ^[1] because it's human-readable, but still lets me write hypertext directly. Hypertext is awesome! Zettlr is nice because it makes Markdown even more human-readable, especially for links, which makes it easier to edit my writing.

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

My inspiration tends to come and go unexpectedly. Sometimes things that get me excited about the “vibe” of writing—books like This Is How You Lose the Time War, or thinking about nice typography or stationery—will encourage me to write, but for the most part, I keep things as easy and readily available as possible to do a bit of writing as the mood strikes. I have the Syncthing file synchronization program running on my MacBook, as well as on my phone and my partner's old laptop that I inherited and use as a Linux computer. This way I always have my work-in-progress writing available and I can dash out a few lines the moment I'm inspired to do so.

6. Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I used to rush right to publishing, but I really enjoyed the experience with this post of letting myself wait until I was good and ready. Tracy Durnell offered to edit people's blog posts for December, and I received her edits right as I was finishing up grading for my fall 2024 classes, so I had to wait. I found this unexpectedly pleasant—I got to sit with the ideas for longer, and I feel my writing ended up better as a result.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

Radio—Listening Musically, Being Haunted, the one I mentioned for the previous question. I enjoyed writing about the sounds I love from an aesthetic, rather than technical/sound design perspective, and taking it slow and getting outside input helped make the writing something I'm very happy with.

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I'm planning to start using more academic citations, and to add a digital garden. Zettlr integrates nicely with the open-source Zotero citation manager and the BibTeX set of citation tools, and this got me thinking it would be cool to try integrating that with my site. It could give me a fun reason to start reading more sound studies papers and referencing them as I write about composing with the weird sounds I love. In Maggie Appleton's latest post, she has academic citations that have a little SVG graduation cap icon and mouse-over previews of the linked page. I like how this looks and want to try something like it myself.

Maggie Appleton has also written about digital gardens. She comments that

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis.

A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time.

I like this idea. It sounds like a great way to feel seen online without the pressure of getting things perfect the first time. It's also similar to the way “personal knowledge management” software such as Zettlr or Obsidian works, and I've been enjoying using those programs to make my own personal wiki of the information I find interesting and important. It could be fun to tie such a garden in to my composition practice in specific—I have been writing about that more lately. Olu also has a digital garden that I really like the design of, and I'm strongly considering the Quartz tool they use to make a digital garden on my site.